MUMBAI: Volkswagen Group-owned, Czech car major Skoda Auto is undertaking a slew of measures to fuel its growth in India and contribute significantly to its global goal of achieving 1.5 million units sales by 2018. Skoda India has created a new line of leadership under a new organisation structure, ET has learnt.

It is further infusing fresh equity of over Rs 300 crore in Indian operations to increase localisation and expand production and is working overtime on the new product portfolio strategy to boost its volumes in India.

"To handle our future growth plan and its cross-functional tasks for the very important Indian market, it is necessary to have a corresponding management structure," said Juergen Stackmann, Skoda Auto Board member in charge of sales and marketing.

"India is one of our main strategic pillars of our growth strategy. We establish a structure in India that will also apply in other major markets to manage future growth," he added. Skoda recently appointed Sudhir Rao as the new managing director of the company, a position which never existed before. Along with Rao, Skoda has got a new line of leadership in the sales & marketing front.

Kamal Basu, who was with Saatchi & Saatchi, has come on board as the head of marketing whereas Ashish Deshpande has been elevated to the position of head of sales. Under the new structure, all four functional executive directors of sales & marketing, HR, finance and director technical will report directly to Rao with a dual function of reporting to the respective Skoda board members.

This will help the car maker to take decisions faster and react quickly to changing market dynamics. Rao reports to the Skoda board members responsible for India region.

"The funds will go into enlargement of production depth (localisation of production ) and expansion of production capacity at the Aurangabad," a statement from Skoda Auto said. Experts say, Skoda as a brand has created a strong image in the premium end of the market, but it will have to work on its pricing to appease the larger audience.

VG Ramakrishnan, senior director , automotive practice at Frost & Sullivan , believes Skoda is a fairly strong brand in India today and realigning its position with Volkswagen has kind of helped the company.

"The perception of Skoda as a premium brand is gradually waning and that in a way is good for the brand. With the success of Rapid and the planned entry of compact cars like Citigo will help Skoda move from a niche player to a mainline player, provided they get the pricing right and improve on cost of ownership , with steady stream of product lines," said Ramakrishnan.

"We cannot have any weaknesses in our product offering to the end customers . A greater emphasis is being put on the pace of dealership reach into the country. We have a competitive portfolio today, but to aspire to higher volumes , there is need to appeal to a wider target market and we are working on those directions," said Rao.